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Lincoln Abraham Lincoln 



By Edward A. Sumner 



THE TANDY-THOMAS COMPANY 

PUBLISHEBS NEW YORK 






^ 



>i 







ABRAHAM LINCOLN 



Abraham Lincoln 



An Address 

DELIVERED BEFORE THE MEN'S LEAGUE 

OF THE BROADWAY TABERNACLE 

CHURCH OF NEW YORK 

FEB. 10th 1902 



by: 

EDWARD A. SUMNER 

OF THE 

NEW YORK BAR 



NEW YORK 
THE TANDY-THOMAS COMPANY 

1910 






By transfer 
The White House 
March 3rd, 1913 

*I have always tried to plucK up a; 
thistle and plant a flower, wherever 
I thought a flower would grow." 

i — Lincoln. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 



AS THE visitor leans upon the gallery balus- 
trade of the National Library at Wash- 
ington, that monument of beauty, that 
gift to their country of the best that is in Ameri- 
can architecture and genius and art, he finds im- 
printed upon its walls words befitting the chaste 
splendor of their surroundings. And first across 
from his eye is this "Hither repairing other stars 
in their golden urns draw light." 

A sentiment we may happily make our own 
whenever we come together once in the year upon 
the time named in our laws, and setting aside 
the care and the rush and the turmoil and the dis- 
traction of the life of the nation and of this, its 
teeming metropolis, may again draw hope and 
faith and inspiration and pride and light into the 
golden urns of our citizenship from that great 
star of the nation's dark and troublesome and 
Homeric days, ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

If some measure of this be taken to ourselves 
in the brief time of this evening; if any heart 

6 



6 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

in this audience be strengthened in his personal 
life, in his struggle for right citizenship and in a 
splendid and abiding belief in the working out of 
a destiny for this land of ours, for ourselves and 
our children after us, a destiny whose greatness it 
has never yet been vouchsafed mortal eye to fore- 
see, then your speaker will count the whole ob- 
ject of this address accomplished. 

The story of this life is a thrice told tale, but 
it is one where age cannot wither or custom stale 
its infinite variety. This is the more true if the 
first impressions are the vivid ones of the dawn 
of boyhood. Which happened to be my own good 
fortune. It was fully forty years ago. The Sep- 
tember stars had begun to twinkle that night upon 
the then western frontier town on the Wisconsin 
banks of the rolling Mississippi. The evening 
breezes, fragrant and cool from upland bluff and 
prairie stretch were wafting in with that soft and 
velvet touch so characteristic of those early days 
of the plateaus of the new Northwest. Soon they 
bore the sound of fife and drum and then the tread 
of marching feet. Along the street swung a line 
of a hundred men, the flag at their head, and each 
bore his torch and wore the glazed cap and cape. 
There was a halt at my father's gate. He joined 
them. And they swung away into the darkness, 
singing in mighty unison to their rhythmic tread 
one of the great songs of the north land : 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 9 

these three little ones. Left alone. Youngest and 
smallest of them all, Abraham peered around the 
rough wooden headstone, looking at him who 
spoke and prayed, through eyes tear-stained and 
filled for the first time with the great and un- 
speakable mystery of death, and from which was 
never thereafter to leave that look of mysticism 
and sorrow which marked the face of ABRA- 
HAM LINCOLN like the face of an Isaiah, 
great prophet of his people in days of old. 

And so Lincoln grew into older boyhood and 
young manhood in the forest home close to the 
very heart of nature herself. And there the thirst 
for knowledge came full upon him. The stronger 
and the deeper that there were no wells of the 
printed books from which he might drink. In his 
father's cabin were but three of these. The Bible, 
iE sop's Fables and Pilgrim's Progress. And so 
it came to pass that this boy who was a master 
in woodcraft, who knew the ways of the bird and 
of the beast, who had learned the lessons of the 
woodland and the forest and the stream and the 
hill, of the moss upon the tree and of the latter 
and the early rains, of the promise of the bow 
in the cloud, of the harvest and seed time and of 
all the sweet teachings of nature, found first of 
the books of men three of their rarest classics and 
in one of them the very voices of God. Fortu- 
nate indeed was that boy and fortunate the nation 



10 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

over whose strange and wonderful destiny he was 
in later years to be called to preside. 

Young Lincoln read and reread these books 
until he knew two of them by heart and until all 
had become wrought into the very fibre of his 
nature. They formed his beliefs and became his 
literary taste. These never forsook him. Out of 
the Fables came that fondness for and aptness in 
story and illustration which so characterized his 
whole career. Out of Pilgrim's Progress and the 
Bible came that masterful, that simple, that clear 
cut and exquisite Anglo-Saxon diction and style 
which was to rank him as one of the first of the 
orators of the world and which reached its acme 
and perfect flower in that speech upon the battle- 
field of Gettysburg. One of the few that was not 
born to ever die. 

What the meagre home could not give him in 
books the boy walked miles to borrow from kindly 
neighbors, who were reckoned those days literally 
by miles. Thus he had from neighbor Crawford 
and brought home in the bosom of his hunting 
shirt and read a Life of Washington, by Weems. 
That evening the crude and homemade tallow dip 
burned down and out. The boy tucked the 
precious book into the log wall beside him. With 
the morning light he reached for it. The night's 
storm had blistered and soaked its every page. 
But only to bring straight to the fore the boy's 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 11 

honor and determination, great qualities in which 
this boy was father to the man. For three days 
he bound himself to that neighbor a bondsman at 
the pulling of cornstalks, until he paid for and 
owned the half ruined, but still eagerly studied 
volume. No story of Lincoln is new. But wher- 
ever his life is recounted this one should be told 
as a memorial of him. 

To such books, read anyhow and anywhere so 
only he could read, read between blow of axe and 
swing of maul at day, and by back log fire into the 
far night, were added Cooper's Leather Stocking 
Tales and the priceless gems of Burns and the 
Bard of Avon. The former, in the judgment of 
Lincoln's mature j^ears, only little less great than 
the matchless genius of the latter. No wonder at 
this estimate. For the Scotch poet knew the 
human heart as few ever did and the American 
martyr sounded all the depths of its pathos, its 
suffering and its sorrow close to the people he 
loved and led through those years of terror and 
death. 

And now there came a turn in the tide of this 
boy's life, strange, unlooked for, uncounted on, 
that bore him to the sight and the hearing of a 
new thing; a thing that seared his high soul for- 
ever toward it; that lifted him up as the leader of 
his Nation against it; that overthrew it; that 
made him the Emancipator; that martyred him; 



12 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

that gave him high place among the Immortals 
forever. 

Storekeeper Gentry must send a cargo of prod- 
uce to New Orleans by flat boat ; that lumbering, 
scow-like, deckless ark of primitive river days, 
borne with the downward current and out to the 
rolling drift of the mighty Mississippi. The boy 
knew nothing of navigation. He knew nothing of 
the lower Mississippi. But he did know honor to 
the core. And Gentry would send none other. 
With one companion the voyage was successfully 
made. And at its end ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
filled with the toil and poverty, but splendid free- 
dom of his own life, had been brought face to face 
with human slavery, and the hopeless bondage of 
others. 

The years took him now into young manhood's 
estate; the family had again set their faces to 
the West, and moved from the forests of Indiana 
to the broad prairies of Illinois. Here the hard 
and bitter struggle went on. Here the character 
was builded, chiseled in stone rough to look upon, 
but destined to stand fast upon the everlasting 
rock of justice and righteousness against the fury 
of all the storms of earth upon it. 

There was a country store and Lincoln kept it ; 
law books and he mastered them, and joined the 
circuit riders of the Bar; men destined to fame in 
the Republic, 'John Calhoun, Edward D. Baker, 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 13 

Lyman Trumbull, John J. Hardin, John A. 
Logan, McClernard and Stephen A. Douglass; 
he became a soldier of the Black Hawk War; in 
1832 was defeated for the Legislature; in 1834 
was elected; and again in 1837; both times as a 
Whig. In this last Session, when to do it was a 
bold and dangerous thing, he, with magnificent 
courage, dealt his first blow in that cause with 
which his destiny had been so strangely linked. 
Here it is : 

March 3, 1837. 

"Resolutions upon the subject of domestic slav- 
ery having passed both branches of the General 
Assembly at its present session, the undersigned 
hereby protest against the passage of the same. 

"They believe that the institution of slavery is 
founded on both injustice and bad policy, but that 
the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends 
rather to increase than abate its evils. 

"They believe that the Congress of the United 
States has no power, under the Constitution, to 
interfere with the institution of slavery in the dif- 
ferent States. 

"They believe that the Congress of the United 
States has the power, under the Constitution, to 
abohsh slavery in the District of Columbia, but 
that the power ought not to be exercised, unless 
at the request of the people of the District. 



14 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

"The difference between these opinions and 
those contained in the above resolutions is their 
reason for entering this protest. 
(Signed) 

"DAN STONE, 
"A. LINCOLN, 
"Representatives from the County of Sangamon." 

For this he became known as the Sangamon 
Chief; banqueted there and given these toasts 
which have survived from those distant days: 

"Abraham Lincoln: he has fulfilled the expec- 
tations of his friends and disappointed the hopes 
of his enemies." 

"A. Lincoln: one of nature's noblemen." 

These, now, were the days when discussion and 
event were hurrying on all over the land to the 
night which should flame the sky with Civil War 
and fill the Republic with the tread of the feet of 
armed men. What metal was in the soul must 
ring false or true. 

During the Legislature of 1839 came a great 
debate. In the one camp was Douglass. In the 
other was Lincoln. To the latter was flung the 
taunt that his cause was hopeless and his numbers 
few. The flint struck deep and out flashed one of 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 15 

those living sparks filled with the fire of the heart 
of the man. Lincoln rose and said: 

"Address that argument to cowards and 
knaves. With the free and the brave it will affect 
nothing. It may be true; if it must, let it. Many 
free countries have lost their liberty, and ours may 
lose hers; but, if she shall, let it be my proudest 
plume, not that I was the last to desert, but that 
I never deserted her." 

Here again spoke honor. Here again was the 
lion-like courage. Here the words of the states- 
man f arseeing, and of the man. Here once more 
the strong, the pure, the simple and the beautitul 
diction of the orator matchless. Here agam the 
ringing call of the silver trumpet challengmg de- 
fiance to the walls of the citadel of error and 

wrong. . .J 4. • 

In the year 1840 occurred two mcidents m 
Lincoln's home town of Springfield, which were 
of lasting effect upon his character and career. 
With the happenings of these he stepped forever 
from the local stage and into that national arena, 
which was to mean for him fame everlastmg. The 
State Auditor of Illinois was James Shields, able 
impetuous, hot headed, a democrat and a political 
opponent of the rail splitter. Lincoln wrote and 
had printed in the Sangamon Journal a letter 
whose pretended author was a widow. Therein 
she bewailed hard times and dembcratic rule. 



16 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

And therein directed keen and satirical allusions 
to Shields. This politician who boasted with his 
other qualities a very sensitive disposition, raged 
through the town to discover the author. There- 
upon another letter appeared from the widow of- 
fering to assuage Mr. Shields by marrying him. 
These productions were the talk of that section 
of the State. Shields demanded of the editor the 
name of the author. Lincoln sent word that he 
was responsible. Shields promptly challenged to 
a duel, the challenge was accepted and the tall 
rail splitter chose as weapons, "Cavaliy broad- 
swords of the largest size." Needless to say the 
duel never came off. Shields left uncontested 
such a field with such an opponent with such a 
weapon in hands and arms that had for years 
swung the axe and the maul in the wilderness. 
Lincoln explained to him that the letters were 
intended as j^olitical, and not personal. And the 
incident closed. But the man of a nation's life 
had learned a lesson he never forgot. With char- 
acteristic modesty and frankness he owned the 
mistake. Of useless personal bickering and con- 
tention and quarrel he afterwards said: 

"Quarrel not at all. No man resolved to make 
the most of himself can spare the time for per- 
sonal contention. Still less can he afford to take 
all the consequences, including the vitiating of his 
temper and the loss of self control. Yield larger 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 17 

things to which you can show no more than equal 
right; and yield lesser ones though clearly your 
own. Better give your path to a dog than be bit- 
ten by him in contesting for the right. Even 
killing the dog would not cure the bite." 

The other incident was his marriage to Miss 
Todd, which took place on the 4th day of Novem- 
ber, 1840, and it gave to him a wife to whom he 
was devoted from that day to the end of his 
earthly journey. It is of interest to note here an 
extract from one of his letters in which he says 
that their living expenses were then "only fo.ur 
dollars a week for board and lodging." 

Here again shines the utter simplicity and hon- 
esty of this man's life. Content with his help- 
mate to begin where they could. Content that 
their income should never be outlived no matter 
how meagre, no matter how small, no matter 
what sacrifice to keep within its limit. 

And now the Republic was to begin to know 
what manner of man this was. The next period 
of Lincoln's life was crowded to the brim. In the 
victorious Harrison Log Cabin and Hard Cider 
campaign of 1840 he took the National stump for 
his party. 

The Thirtieth Congress saw him representing 
his old Sangamon district already made famous 
by Douglass and Baker. His one speech there 
reviewing the Mexican War and j^ttacking the 



18 ABRAHAM LINCOLN* 

administration of Polk was by common consent a 
masterpiece. High praise indeed. For m that 
Congress in the Senate were Douglass and Davis 
and Benton and Calhoun and Dix and Cass and 
Webster; and in the house were Robert C. Wm- 
throp, that knight errant with flashing blade 
from the old Commonwealth of Massachusetts 
Andrew Johnson and John G. Palfrey and Caleb 
B. Smith and ex-President John Qumcy Adams, 
while from the south had come Robert Toombs 
and Howell Cobb and Alexander H. Stevens. 
Mark the tribute of Stevens to this then unknown 
oneof the West: 

"He always attracted and riveted the attention 
of the House when he spoke. His manner of 
speech, as well as thought, was original. He had 
no model. He was a man of strong convictions 
and what Carlisle would have called an earnest 
man. He abounded in aneddote. He illustrated 
everything he was talking about with an anec- 
dote, always exceedingly apt and pointed; and 
socially he always kept his company m a roar ot 

laughter." _ , , 

Close upon this came "The Old Rough and 
Ready" campaign resulting in the election ot 
General Taylor and remarkable for its showing 
of how political parties were disintegrating and 
new lines slowly but surely forming for the great 
struggle that was in the air. With the Whigs 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 19 

were joined the Barn Burners, the Native Ameri- 
cans, Tyler's men, office-seeking Loco Focos, 
and, as Lincohi so characteristically put it, "all 
the odds and ends and the Lord knows what." 

Meantime in Buffalo was born that party 
whose battle cry was "Free Soil, Free Labor and 
Free Speech;" they nominated Martin Van 
Buren and the Democracy nominated Lewis 
Cass. William H. Seward in supporting Taylor 
said, "Freedom and Slavery are two antagonistic 
elements of society in America." 

Lincoln said, "I am a northern man, or rather a 
western Free State man, with a constituency I 
believe to be, and with personal feeling I know to 
be against the extension of Slavery." And so the 
storm gathered and discussion and many tongued 
rumor foreran. And Texas and Kansas and Ne- 
braska were dealt with. And the line was drawn. 
East and West it ran. And across it and back 
and across again went the man whose color was 
black; whose status was now slave and now free 
and whom then the Supreme Court of the United 
States named and defined as human chattel. 

On the 8th day of May, 1854, was finally 
passed through Congress the bill of Stephen A. 
Douglass, Senator from Illinois, organizing the 
two territories of Kansas and Nebraska and leav- 
ing the question of Slavery to their settlers. 
There was a boom of artillery on Capitol Hill in 



20 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

Washington. And a burst of answering flame 
from the whole North. Hence arose the "Squat- 
ter Sovereignty" cry of Douglass and his sup- 
porters. And the answering shout of defiance of 
"Popular Sovereignty" of all who opposed. Into 
the debatable territory rushed settlers from the 
North and South with arms in their hands. And 
here the first blood of the struggle was shed. 
Douglass came home to Illinois astounded at the 
burst of wrath that was upon him. In Chicago 
where he first essayed he was not permitted to 
speak, but in Springfield in October came the 
great State Fair. And there he declared he 
would speak and would be heard. And there 
Lincoln was chosen to reply. Never was the 
Senator from Illinois more subtle, more crafty, 
more filled with guile of political expedient than 
on that historic day and in that historic speech. 
And never was such craft and such guile so an- 
swered, so revealed, so stripped of every shred 
of the garment of its hypocrisy, so crushed by the 
power of logic, so overwhelmed by tremendous 
array of fact and argument, so stung to its death 
by the merciless steel of truth and so rent and 
torn and dismembered by the aroused lion that 
was upon it, as in the masterful speech of Abra- 
ham Lincoln in answer. In one trenchant, cut- 
ting and terrible sentence that was never there- 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 21 

after to go out from the memory of men, he de- 
stroyed the speech of Douglass. 

"I admit that the emigrant to Kansas and Ne- 
braska is competent to govern himself; but I 
deny his right to govern any other person with- 
out that person's consent." 

But one thing could come from such a speech 
and such an answer in such a country and in such 
an era of its history. And that came quickly. In 
Bloomington, Illinois, May 29th, 1856, was or- 
ganized a party in that State, whose corner stone 
Lincoln was appealed to for and which took the 
one he gave, when he said : 

"Let us in building our new party make our 
corner stone the Declaration of Independence; 
let us build on this rock and the gates of Hell 
shall not prevail against us." 

They called its name Republican, and dedi- 
cated it for freedom. Its first Presidential nomi- 
nee, Freemont, the Pathfinder, was defeated. 
Then came the canvass for the United States 
Senatorship of Illinois. And those wonderful 
debates between Lincoln and Douglass, which for 
surpassing power and masterful logic and pathos 
and the education of a whole people in those po- 
litical principles which are founded deep in the 
immutable and everlasting laws of the righteous- 
ness of God, have never been equalled since the 
world began. The times were ripe, the men were 



22 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

ready, and the eyes of the world were beginning 
to turn toward that starve whereon the great 
drama was to be played. Nothing was lacking 
to make the occasion great and in nothing did it 
lack of greatness. If Lincoln's career had ended 
with the Senatorial election in that State, which 
defeated him, none the less would he have come 
out of these debates with a fame not soon to 
vanish from the minds of men. But it was not 
so ordained. Fate bore on until he was known as 
a candidate for the nomination by the Republican 
party for the Presidency of the United States. 
Early in 1860 Lincoln was invited to speak in 
New York at Cooper Union. His friends dread- 
ed the test. How would the back-woodsman fare 
with an eastern audience of culture, of thought, 
of brains, and of the best that the civilization of 
that day could afford? But out of it came Lin- 
coln splendidly triumphant. Disdaining, as 
usual, any of the tricks of oratory, in a speech 
simple, yet scholarly and skillfully formed, with 
fresh and vigorous illustration drawn direct from 
that Nature with which for so many years he had 
communed, he appealed direct to the human heart 
of the East and found the same quick and ready 
response as from the human heart of the West. 
In one of the strongholds itself of the refinement 
of the seaboard he had won a famous victory. 
And this was the way he closed that speech: 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 23 

"Neither let us be slandered from our duty by 
false accusations against us, nor frightened from 
it by menaces of destruction to the government. 
Let us have faith that right makes might, and in 
that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty 
as we understand it." 

Once more the lifting of the trumpet against 
the walls of wrong. Once more the clear and 
ringing blast of defiance. Once more the cour- 
age. And, now, too, we have the outward mani- 
festation of the characteristic of the man so 
wonderful among all the things that went to his 
make up; that far seeing*, that mystic, that 
prophetic vision which from this period of his 
career to the very end so filled his every thought 
and every speech and every utterance. Until his 
countrymen came to look upon him with a rever- 
ence due the prophet and seer. And here too was 
another of the master springs of his character. 
Faith in God, faith in humanity, faith in the right 
that having done all, stands. 

And so it came that on that June day by the 
free rolling waters of Michigan this man was 
bidden by his party to stand for the Presidency 
of the Union. 

There amid the booming of batteries of can- 
non the son of Thomas Lincoln, the back-woods- 
man, "stepped out upon the mighty stage on 



24 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

which was to be enacted one of the most tremen- 
dous tragedies the world has ever seen." 

Down in Springfield town he quietly had the 
news and then went to his home saying: "there 
is a little woman on Eighth street who would like 
to hear about this." 

Much of the time of this address has been de- 
voted to the days that builded the character of 
Lincoln, because in these days it has seemed to 
your speaker were the well springs themselves 
from which we might this evening draw those 
many urns of inspiration. 

The dreadful years that were now upon this 
man and which were to bow that tall, ungainly 
form; and seam that sorrowing face with those 
far away and pitying eyes, with the woe and 
terror and death struggle of a nation, were years 
indeed of his rich fruition. And yet it was but 
the ripening and full shaping of that which was 
already upon the branch when his first presiden- 
tial term began. Nor is there any need to dwell 
long before an American audience upon the ex- 
ceeding bitterness of those dark and bloody and 
dreadful times. The central figure of it all had 
said good-bye forever to his friends in the Illinois 
town that had known so much of his poverty and 
his distress. They should never see him alive 
again. Nor ever again indeed, his face or form, 
until shrouded there in the nation's woe and ready 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 7, 

"John Brown's body lies a mouldering in the 
grave. 
But his soul goes marching on." 

And each shook aloft his torch as men know- 
ing they were about to look upon the throes of the 
young Republic, for life or for death. 

These were the Lincoln Wide Awakes. And 
the campaign was for the first election to the 
Presidency of the tall rail splitter of lUinois. 

No truer word was ever believed or uttered 
than that the Lord of Hosts, who holds in his 
hands the nations of men, had from the first 
chosen and trained and ordained this man to lead 
this people through the terror and the struggle 
and the blood and the cries and the tears, with 
the smoke of a great cloud by day and an exceed- 
ing pillar of fire by night, yea, through the very 
valley of the Shadow of Death itself, of four years 
of Civil War. 

As his fellow citizens gathered about him in 
this never to be forgotten struggle for the Presi- 
dency, they found a man chosen to command, tall 
above his fellows even as Saul of ancient and 
kingly days, awkward at the first in appearance, 
but gifted with a judgment unerring, a power 
of argument and logic supreme, a very simplicity 
and pathos itself of eloquence; with the tender 
heart of a woman and the lion heart of a man. 



8 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

and fitted for the fiery ordeal before him as none 
could have been save by the life of toil and pri- 
vation and hardship and poverty and rigor that 
had been his. Glance briefly at the moulding of 
it and note the perfect tempering of the instru- 
ment through the fires it passed, for the work it 
had to do in the hands of a great people. 

The first test of this nature of ours is by deep 
privation and sorrow; and so it was with him. 

The family had moved in the year 1818 from 
the wilderness of the present State of Kentucky 
to the wilderness of the present State of Indiana. 
Trial and poverty and a hand to hand fight with 
nature for a foothold was its daily lot. 

Then sickness came and for weeks the mother, 
the loving and tender and caring for mother, 
whose sweet and womanly presence in that far off 
cabin of the forest had been the whole light of 
this boy's life, lay wasting with mortal sickness. 
And one night death came and she answered the 
call. In a rough box he helped to hew they low- 
ered her worn form into the arms of mother earth. 
And ashes had returned to ashes and dust to dust 
and the spirit had gone to the Maker who gave it. 
There was a little burial service, with a few far- 
gathered frontier friends about. Simple words 
of hope and of life immortal were spoken by the 
travel stained and circuit riding man of God. 
While at the grave stood the stricken father and 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 25 

for the sepulchre. On the steps at the Capitol in 
Washington he made to his countrymen and to 
the world that exquisite, that pathetic, that heart 
stirring plea for the Union of the land he loved. 
And again he wrote his own superb character in 
these words, to die no more: 

"I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but 
friends. We must not be enemies. Though pas- 
sion may have strained, it must not break our 
bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory 
stretching from every battlefield and patriot 
grave to every living heart and hearthstone all 
over this broad land will yet swell the chorus of 
the Union, when again touched, as surely they 
will be, by the better angels of our nature," 

The first inaugural address was ended. Lin- 
coln turned to the man standing by his side, who 
had held his hat through that magnificent plea 
and his eyes met the eyes and his hand grasped 
the hand of Stephen A. Douglass, the little giant 
of Illinois. At last at one with his great political 
rival, this man, himself little less wonderful than 
Lincoln, turned his face to the West and 
preached with all his fire and fervor and splendid 
magnetism the gospel of the Union that must and 
should be preserved. It was the last up-blaze of 
a brilliant torch, for, in June the summons came 
and Douglass went to his long sleep. 

And what faced that other there at Washing- 



26 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

ton? The Treasury looted. The Navy scattered. 
The army small and disorganized. Officers in 
both branches of the service violating their oaths 
and swearing allegiance to the South; States in 
secession and more going. Senators and Repre- 
sentatives abandoning the Capitol and hurryhig 
to the forming of a new government which should 
tear stars from the flag and take out from among 
its stripes. The South united and some of the 
North divided. Washington defenceless and 
threatened. Then came the shot at Sumter. The 
flames of it burst across the sky and the homids 
of war were slipped at last from their leash. 

Out there in far Wisconsin men who had 
borne the Wide Awake torch that night took the 
musket of the Iron brigade with their war eagle, 
Old Abe, and faced to the front ; and with them 
sprang from every village and city and hamlet a 
host of armed men to see that the Union of 
Webster and the fathers be kept forever one and 
indissoluble. And Lincoln sent the call. And 
how the leaders rose! In Indiana, Morton; in 
Ohio, Dennison; in Pennsylvania, Curtin; in 
New York, Morgan; in Connecticut, Bucking- 
ham ; in Massachusetts, Andrews ; through all the 
north land men set their faces toward their leader 
with another and a new song. "We are coming 
Father Abraham, 300,000 strong." 

Dreadful as an army with banners they 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 27 

streamed to him and for four such years as the 
world had never looked upon their lives went out 
in prison pen, in Southern swamp, and on far 
away battlefield, till the whole land became a 
sepulchre of brave men. Down there in the 
peninsular with McClellan, up here on the banks 
of the Potomac at Antietam ; now along the death 
strewn sides of Fredericksburg-; now in the West 
at Shiloh and Vicksburg; out there with the 
hearts of oak of Farragut in the Bay of Mobile 
or passing the hell of Forts Jackson and St. 
Philip; now with Thomas, the magnificent, at 
Nashville; or with Rosencranz at dreadful Chick- 
amauga, until when it seemed the Nation could 
bear no more came the death grapple over the 
slopes and hills of Gettysburg; the plunge with 
Grant into the burning fires and tangle of the 
Wilderness; the desperate throttle began at the 
bloody angle of Spottsylvania; Sheridan scourg- 
ing the Shenandoah, a very god of war; Sherman 
loosed from all the world and swinging down 
from Atlanta to the sea; and then Cold Harbor 
and Petersburg and the last stand of the tattered 
ranks of gray, those fighters of the lost cause, 
whose splendid courage has always challenged 
the admiration of the army of the blue; and then 
Appomattox and the famous appletree. And 
what of Lincoln? What of that man upon whom 
all this had been laid? Ah, the infinite sorrow and 



28 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

patience and tenderness and pathos of him who 
bore our griefs. No soldier boy of the Union, 
wearied to his sleep on post that would not be 
denied, but could look to Father Abraham, amid 
all the anguish of those days and months and 
years, and pray for the mercy that was sure to 
come. 

"We have had blood enough," he said, "the 
land is filled with it; you shall not shoot one of 
my boys." 

And when the end of it all came, what, again, 
of Lincoln? What of him upon whom the whole 
world had looked for those years? Down there 
in the smoking ruins of the rebel Capitol he 
walked alone with his boy. And upon his skirts 
pressed, and at his feet kneeled down the dusky 
people he had freed. 

And now what for him was there to be ? Rest 
and peace ? Yea, rest and peace that passeth un- 
derstanding. For scarce had he turned to his 
countrymen with these immortal words upon his 
lips of that second and last inaugural, "With 
malice towards none and with charity towards 
all," than the assassin's bullet did its work. And 
Lincoln was dead. After service so valiant and 
true on many a fierce and rugged field this great 
brand Excalibur at last had come at nightfall to 
the shores of that boundless and eternal sea. And 
there strongly wheeled it was and thrown. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 29 

"The great brand made lightnings in the splen- 
dor of the moon, 
And flashing round and round, and whirl'd in an 

arch. 
Shot like a streamer of the northern morn. 
Seen where the moving isles of winter shock 
By night, with noises of the northern sea ; 
So flashed and fell the brand Excalibur: 
But ere he dipt the surface, rose an arm 
Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful. 
And caught him by the hilt, and brandish'd him 
Three times, and drew him vinder in the mere." 

And so passed our Lincoln into the sure keep- 
ing of those that die no more. 

"He has gone," says Stanton, "he belongs now 
to the great of all time." 

Gone but ever with us. No longer of this 
earth, but there among the stars of America's 
noblest and best to shine with splendor and never 
failing* light. 

And if the eye of our citizenship grow dim let 
it here renew its youth, kindled and undazzled at 
the very sun itself of this man's career. 

In no fitter words can the study of this Ameri- 
can be ended to-night than in that Battle Hymn 
of the Republic which was ever his favorite and 
whose measures, stately, grand, beautiful, tender 



30 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

and prophetic are themselves so full of the life 
he led and the death he died : 

"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of 
the Lord, 

He is trampling out the vintage where his grapes 
of wrath are stored, 

He hath loosed the fearful lightnings of his terri- 
ble quick sword, 

His truth is marching on. 

I have seen him in the watch-fires of a hundred 

circling camps. 
They have builded him an altar by the evening 

dews and damps, 
I have read his righteous sentence by the dim and 

flaring lamps, 
His truth is marching on. 

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows 

of steel. 
As ye deal with my contemnors so with you my 

grace shall deal. 
Let the hero born of woman crush the serpent 

with his heel. 
Our God is marching on. 

He hath sounded forth the trumpet that shall 
never call retreat. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 31 

He is sifting out the hearts of men before his 

judgment seat, 
Oh be swift my soul to answer him, be jubilant 

my feet. 
For God is marching on. 

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across 

the sea. 
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you 

and me. 
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make 

men free. 
For God is marching on." 



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